Bioacoustics of Platycleis affinis

The calling song consists of a mixture of short echemes lasting less than 1 s and usually composed of fewer then 7 macrosyllables, and longer echemes lasting 1-5 s and composed of 8-50 macrosyllables. Each echeme usually ends witha. series of 2-9 microsyllables. The echemes are often grouped into one or two short ones followed by a long one, but sometimes they follow one another quite irregularly and occassionally there is a fairly regular sequence of long echemes with few short ones. Oscillographic analysis shows that opening hemisyllables are usually absent and that the closing macrosyllables usually last about 30-110 ms and are repeated at the rate of about 10-20/s. The microsyllables usually last about 3-15 ms and are repeated at the rate of about 17-45/s; the microsyllable sequence at the end of an echeme seldom lastsmore than 0.3 s. The echemes often begin quietly and the first one or two syllables are often shorter than the remaining ones. The intervals between echemes vary greatly: long echemes often follow short echemes witha n intervalof less than a secondor with no pause at all; intervals of a few seconds are common and sometimes there are longer intervals of 30 s or more.